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Geology is All About Scale*
Jan. 13th, 2010 05:16 pmHaiti. Fuck.
One of the things our culture does after a natural disaster is start estimating the number dead. I hate it because it is impossible at this stage in the game. Death toll inflation and deflation both happen, depending on the politics and biases of the estimators.
Figures for Haiti are jumping all over the place. Recently, I've been seeing half a million. That's 500,000 people. That would make this the second deadliest earthquake, after the 1556 Shaaxi earthquake. That's twice as deadly any other earthquake - including the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.
Part of why these estimates are so hard is that people keep dying after the earthquake, especially in a poor country like Haiti. While I don't expect you all to jump on planes to help out, help those who are.
*someone was a TA for Earthquakes and Natural Disasters enough times to memorize numbers.
One of the things our culture does after a natural disaster is start estimating the number dead. I hate it because it is impossible at this stage in the game. Death toll inflation and deflation both happen, depending on the politics and biases of the estimators.
Figures for Haiti are jumping all over the place. Recently, I've been seeing half a million. That's 500,000 people. That would make this the second deadliest earthquake, after the 1556 Shaaxi earthquake. That's twice as deadly any other earthquake - including the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.
Part of why these estimates are so hard is that people keep dying after the earthquake, especially in a poor country like Haiti. While I don't expect you all to jump on planes to help out, help those who are.
*someone was a TA for Earthquakes and Natural Disasters enough times to memorize numbers.
